NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.

Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.

The Trump family has drawn criticism for expanding its real estate business into foreign countries that are trying to curry favor with the president and for making billions of dollars off cryptocurrency ventures benefiting from his policies. Grabbing less attention are new ownership stakes in federal contractors providing everything from rocket parts and rare earth magnets to AI chips and computer hardware.

“It’s corruption,” said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “Government decision makers will feel pressure to use contract awards to enrich the president’s family.”

The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.

Powerus says there is no problem with it bidding for government money that could make the president’s sons richer.

“There’s no conflict there. Whatever they’re doing, is what they’re doing,” said co-founder Brett Velicovich, referring to the Trump brothers. “Our focus at the company has nothing to do with politics.”

Asked to comment about potential conflicts, the Trump Organization sent a statement from Eric Trump: “I am incredibly proud to invest in companies I believe in. Drones are clearly the wave of the future.”

Founded by U.S. Army Special Operations veterans about a year ago, Powerus makes drones mostly for commercial uses, from spreading fertilizer to putting out forest fires. But it is bulking up fast to supply the Defense Department with armed drones like the ones being used by Ukraine and Russia and, more recently, Iran as it rains havoc on Gulf states allied with the U.S.

The company bought three rivals in the past six months and plans to buy more. It just raised $60 million from investors to fund the buying spree and hopes to tap additional financing by doing a “reverse merger” in which a private company gets a public listing by buying one already on the stock market, usually a business with little or no operations.

The public company in this case is Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Florida firm partly owned by Eric and Don Jr. that holds a few golf courses and is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Of the two oldest brothers, Don Jr., is the one most involved in federal contracting firms through a venture capital fund called 1789 Capital.

Shortly after Trump’s reelection, 1789 Capital made Don Jr. a partner and then went on a buying spree of its own, investing in 25 companies in one year. It had made only six purchases in the two years prior, according to data provided by research firm Pitchbook. Most of its targets appear to be seeking federal contracts or taxpayer funds or have already won them

Don Jr. and his brother have also started their own investment firm to buy stakes in U.S. companies designed to help their father revive America’s manufacturing base. After The Associated Press asked Trump’s chief business lawyer about language in a regulatory filing stating the firm would target companies seeking federal grants, he filed a new document with that language removed.

Don Jr. appears well-equipped to help Powerus. He has spoken out about the need for armed drones, appears knowledgeable about the technology and publicly endorsed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when he was coming under fire during his confirmation hearings.

Asked why Powerus picked a Trump company to merge with instead of the hundreds of others on Nasdaq with little or no operations, co-founder Velocovich said he was not a finance specialist and didn’t know.

“Our focus is 100% on getting the right technology in the hands of the warfighter,” he said, “regardless of who the investors are.”

Peaceful and violent, in video game screenshots and movie clips and on professional playing fields, the icons come fast and furious in quick-cut footage — some of the most renowned slivers of 21st-century American popular culture, harnessed by the Trump administration to promote the freshly launched war with Iran.

The White House’s social media feed has issued a series of pumped-up videos that mix real Iran was explosions with movie action heroes, gaming footage and bone-crunching football tackles, leading critics like a top cleric of the U.S. Catholic Church to condemn a trivialization of deadly real-life conflict.

Clips from “Braveheart,” “Superman,” “Top Gun,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Iron Man.” All appear cut between declassified imagery of what is presumably the Iran war. Even the cartoon likeness of SpongeBob SquarePants is spliced in, asking, “You wanna see me do it again?” in between images of buildings, planes and vehicles blown up by American bombs. The caption on one bomb-heavy post: “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” — the title of a post-9/11 Toby Keith song about war that is subtitled “The Angry American.”

The fiction-meets-reality product of the White House’s aggressive social media team cuts a wide swath through cultural touchstones that resonate with young men, including the video games Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Halo. Two videos feature NFL and college football tackles and Major League Baseball home runs — with the cracks of bats interspersed with explosions.

They’re set to ominous or aggressive music, including Childish Gambino’s “Bonfire,” Miami XO’s “Bazooka” and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” One of the White House postings described the video as “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” accompanied by flag and fire emojis.

It’s hard not to see the thinking here: The more cinematic the content, the more people might support the war.

Two actors call for their depictions to be removed from videos

The sounds and images of American popular culture, a sure attention-getter in many contexts, have increasingly been used in politics in recent decades, at least as far back as Bill Clinton’s use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” during his 1992 presidential campaign. Never, though, has a White House built and disseminated content quite like this, drawing explicit parallels between the aggressive moments of modern entertainment — a video game kill shot, a hard football hit, a towering home run — and battle footage to amplify the enthusiasm for war.

What’s happening with the White House videos, which some call the “gamification” of war, hasn’t landed well in some quarters.

Two actors whose work appeared in the videos — Ben Stiller, who starred in the 2008 movie “Tropic Thunder,” and Steve Downes, who portrays Master Chief, the protagonist in Halo — said the material was used without permission and called for their depictions to be removed.

Stiller said on X that he had “no interest in being part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.” Downes called the videos “disgusting and juvenile war porn.” Neither the NFL nor Major League Baseball would comment on the use of their footage in the war videos.

The discussion reached a high level in the U.S. Catholic Church as well. Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, said he found it sickening to see a war that has brought real death and suffering being treated like a video game. That approach, he said, dishonors the people who have died, including U.S. servicemen.

“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store,” Cupich said in a weekend statement. “But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military.”

Asked for comment, the White House would not say whether or not it would accommodate artists who said their work was used without permission.

“America’s heroic warfighters are meeting or surpassing all of their goals under Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”

It’s not the first time this White House has trotted out game-related memes. Last year, it posted a drawing of Trump dressed as Master Chief. In another, it made Trump look like a blocky Minecraft character with the caption: “America’s most pro-gamer president.”

Every war has a psychological dimension, and this seems to be part of it, said Zia Haque, director of the Baker Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. “We live in a digital age, and I see this as a use of the space to propagate the message across the board,” he said.

A motivation to be cool?

Some observers also cast the administration’s content as potential efforts to encourage gamers to join the military. It wouldn’t be a first: The Pentagon’s efforts to recruit players date to at least 2002, with the release of a first-person shooter called America’s Army. The Defense Department also sends recruiters to video game conventions and esports tournaments.

Today, many of Trump’s loudest fans are young white men who are gamers and heavy consumers of sports and popular culture — and thus likely a receptive audience for such imagery and music.

Many young men are motivated to join the military because they want to be cool like the people they see in action movies, said Ray Deptula, who recently retired from the U.S. Navy after 24 years and rose to the rank of commander. That’s what motivated him, he said. So he can see the appeal of the videos.

But, he says, there’s a caveat — a big one.

“That’s not what your life is going to be like,” said Deptula, who recently wrote a novel, “A Dog Before a Soldier,” about a young man who joined the military out of desperation during the Revolutionary War. “Your life is going to be about hard work and humility.”

But Jeff Fromm, co-author of “Marketing to Gen Z,” has doubts about the videos’ long-term effectiveness.

Many young people in Generation Z are keenly interested in transparency and the values of organizations they are seeking to join, and Fromm questions whether the current administration rates highly in those areas.

Sometimes the overlap between real life and game culture is accidental. Last week, Trump posted on Truth Social that defense contractors had agreed to “quadruple Production of the ‘Exquisite Class’ Weaponry.” Policy experts were puzzled — but Final Fantasy XIV players were reminded of the game’s most powerful weapons. Still, the president probably wasn’t calling for the game’s Exquisite Wrathgrinder to go into production.

___

Associated Press correspondents Matt Brown in Washington and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.